O’Reilly, Billin full William James O’Reilly ( born September 10, 1949 , New YorkCity, New York, U.S.American conservative political commentator and television and radio personality, best known for hosting the Fox News Channel (FNC) program The O’Reilly Factor and, prior to that, coanchoring the syndicated tabloid television news program Inside Edition.

O’Reilly grew up on Long Island, New York, and attended Marist College, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in history in 1971. After teaching high school for two years, he enrolled at Boston University, where he graduated with a master’s degree in broadcast journalism in 1976. For the next four years O’Reilly worked as a television newscaster for local stations around the country, including in Dallas, Denver, Scranton (Pennsylvania), and other cities in the Northeast. In 1980 he relocated to New York City, where he anchored his own show for WCBS. In 1982 he became a CBS network news correspondent. He left after a dispute with the network and joined ABC News in 1986 as a reporter for ABC World News Tonight. In 1989 O’Reilly joined Inside Edition as a senior correspondent, but within weeks he became the show’s coanchor and served in that capacity until 1995. At that time O’Reilly enrolled at Harvard University, earning a master’s degree in public administration. In 1996 he joined the Fox News Channel to anchor his own show, originally called The O’Reilly Report. The program soon moved to a more prominent time slot and was renamed The O’Reilly Factor.

As the Emmy Award-winning host of The O’Reilly Factor, O’Reilly enjoyed widespread fame and consistently high ratings. His outspokenness and aggressive interviewing style helped to define the FNC brand and to solidify his cultivated image as a gruff plainspoken commentator.

O’Reilly was also a syndicated columnist and a best-selling author. An early foray into fiction, Those Who Trespass: A Novel of Murder and Television (1998), gave way to a series of tracts reiterating his opposition to what he saw as the negative impact of “secular-liberal” thinking in American life. Among these those volumes were The O’Reilly Factor: The Good, Bad, and Completely Ridiculous in American Life (2000), Who’s Looking Out for You? (2003), Culture Warrior (2006), and Pinheads and Patriots: Where You Stand in the Age of Obama (2010). O’Reilly also distilled his philosophies for a younger audience in The O’Reilly Factor for Kids: A Survival Guide for America’s Families (2004) and Kids Are Americans, Too (2007), both written with Charles Flowers. A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity (2008) was a memoir charting the development of his political ideology. He analyzed the assassination assassinations of U.S. Pres. Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy in Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever (2011) and Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot (2012), respectively; both were cowritten with Martin Dugard).